Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum<\/a>. \u201cWhen historians say that these people are gathering together and weighing a decision that may cause their death, this isn\u2019t hyperbole.\u201d<\/p>\nThe issue came up after voters elected anti-independence conservatives to Pennsylvania\u2019s Colonial Assembly on May 1. One of them was James Allen, son of Allentown founder William Allen, who wanted to remain a subject of the United Kingdom despite having reservations about how the colonies were being treated by London.<\/p>\n
\u2018Rude\u2019 farmers<\/p>\n
It also exposed ethnic tensions between the establishment and newcomers, something that the Lehigh Valley deals with to this day.<\/p>\n
Higgins noted that most of the Associators were German-speaking farmers, considered to be \u201crude\u201d \u2014 rough, poor and uneducated \u2014 by some, such as Benjamin Franklin, who criticized them for not speaking English.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people gathering in this area were predominantly Pennsylvania Dutch,\u201d Higgins said. \u201cBen Franklin had previously expressed frustration during the French and Indian War that the area lacked English speakers and was populated by poor, rough settlers. Because these German settlers had no ancestral ties to Britain, it may have ultimately been easier for them to decide to break away.\u201d<\/p>\n
They were encouraged to meet by the Continental Congress, which voted May 15 for a resolution calling on each colony to create a government that would provide \u201cfor the happiness and safety of the people,\u201d meaning one that would support independence.<\/p>\n
The Associators gathered at the Guth farm to do just that. The members elected Maj. Philip Boehm, a radical, as their chair. Then they voted unanimously that the Colonial Assembly no longer represented the will of the people and that a convention be called to draft a new constitution.<\/p>\n
With the exception of those actions, most of the proceedings were lost to history.<\/p>\n
Higgins said there are no detailed, firsthand written accounts from the exact day of the meeting. At the time, paper was expensive, modern newspapers did not exist and the farmers likely didn\u2019t realize the full historic nature of their actions.<\/p>\n
On July 2, when the Continental Congress voted for the Declaration of Independence, there were two empty chairs in the Pennsylvania delegation. They belonged to the two conservative delegates who chose not to vote. In their absence, Pennsylvania joined the other colonies in offering a majority vote for independence.<\/p>\n
The militia group itself, Higgins said, was more of a social organization by that time after being formed years before as a frontier-defense force against the French or Native Americans.<\/p>\n
Afterward, most of the Associators went back to their farms, but hundreds joined the war effort. Many took part at the Battle of Long Island in present-day Brooklyn, a British victory, and spent time as prisoners of war. Others were able to fight all the way to the final victory at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.<\/p>\n
The course of history was changed in the field of a Pennsylvania Dutch farming family.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt may have struck us with 21st-century eyes as unbelievably rough, almost comical, that this group of farmers were meeting to help decide the fate of the entire colony of Pennsylvania and, frankly, the British Empire,\u201d Higgins said.<\/p>\n
Morning Call reporter Evan Jones can be reached at ejones@mcall.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the more important events in the drive for American independence 250 years ago happened next to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,4000,62733,433,157,182,139,9790,28,664,432],"class_list":["post-223437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-america-250","tag-america-250-pa","tag-lehigh-county","tag-lehigh-valley","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-parkland-area","tag-pennsylvania","tag-south-whitehall-township","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}